The apparent unraveling of an enigma in the publishing world — the identity of the author behind the enormously successful Neapolitan quartet of novels, which have millions of readers in Europe and the United States — has unleashed a firestorm. Passionate fans of the novels, released in 40 countries since the first one, My Brilliant Friend, appeared in 2011, have condemned the journalist who unmasked the Italian translator Anita Raja as the quartet’s apparent creator, whose pen name is Elena Ferrante.

The venom of the attacks against Claudio Gatti, the Italian journalist who published the results of his investigation in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, is unwarranted. Critics have pounced on him for shattering Raja’s closely guarded privacy; for providing no sound rationale for undertaking his research; and for desecrating a pact between the author and some readers, who preferred to savor the art without regard to the artist.

One can appreciate the passion of the quartet’s fans, who cherish the novels’ textured portrait of a complex friendship between two women, set against the unsparing history of postwar Italy. One can admire their protective instincts toward the author, who has said that shunning the literary limelight and its celebrity trappings is critical to the preservation of her “creative space.”

But Ferrante (or Raja) is not a sacred deity; she is a gifted writer. As such, her identity is a legitimate subject of interest. Literary scholarship is rich with studies of Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters and others, including those who wished fervently to be left alone by devotees and the wide world, such as J.D. Salinger. If the Neapolitan quartet is an influential work on feminism, Italy or postwar history, and some readers and scholars want to delve into its origins, why should that be suppressed?

The author rejects the idea that knowing something of her life may enhance or elucidate her books; she’s entitled to that view and under no obligation to speak with critics. Yet why skewer those who disagree? Rather than condemn such curiosity, perhaps it should be recognized for what it is: imperfectly human.

Raja’s defenders wonder why the world, awash in information, saturated with social media, could not have carved out just this zone of exemption. They might equally be glad that in an era of Twitter and Snapchat, of crimped attention spans and a celebration of so much that is prosaic and profane, there remains a little bit of an obsession with literature.

The Washington Post